Student Leaders Emerge and Help Engineering Honors Program to Thrive

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In creating an educational experience to challenge and match the ambitions of the college's best students, the Engineering Honors Program (EHP) has become a place where student leaders step forward, develop, and flourish.

Beginning five years ago with 22 first-year students, EHP now numbers more than 240 undergraduates at all levels. Members of the first class are now in PhD programs at CalTech, Stanford, and UC Davis; in master's programs at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge; and in jobs at Shell, Lockheed Martin, and J.D. Power and Associates.

They were selected to be Goldwater, NASA, and Marshall Scholars; two-time winners of the international Mathematical Contest in Modeling, the 2010 College's Outstanding Graduate, and the 2010 Silver Medal Award winner.

The foundation for their success has been a commitment to creating a certain type of community, centered around Andrews Hall—CU's first residential college with a faculty member in residence, EHP Director Scot Douglass and his family, and approximately 45 percent non-first-year students.

What makes this community work, Douglass says, is student leadership—students who choose to stay on campus and invest in their peers, students who fight for what is good and authentic, students who craft a space that is deeply ambitious without being competitive.

This year's graduating class has four such leaders whose incredible contributions to the larger EHP community flow from the very attractive community they have forged among themselves. Here are a few words from each of them.